Northrop Frye (1912 – 1991)
Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
[Students] have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don’t know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach.